the air in unutterable coolness
by Sister Coyote
Summary: Rain made him happy. Havoc/Mustang. Fluff, smut.


Rain made him happy. The eastern countryside where he'd grown up, it never rained enough: the soil was good and rich, the temperature perfect for crops, so every year what they prayed for was enough rain to make the wheat grow, to keep the apple trees green, to make the beanstalks wind their way around their poles. So a rainy season was a good season, a rainfall a happy occasion. When he was a boy, he'd gone with his cousins down to the ditch near the house, watched the bottom of it fill slowly with the swirl of muddy water—and then to the watering hole in the pasture, whose banks overfilled, drowning the grass, which waved beneath the dappled surface of the water. He'd come home soaked to the skin and grinning, to warm towels and hot cider.

So when the rain started (a mist at first, not even enough to really damp his uniform jacket) he kept walking, turning his face to the mellow grey of the sky and feeling the moisture on his skin. It made him smile, even though now his livelihood had pretty much nothing to do with the weather. Even when the rain grew harder, he didn't seek shelter. Water slicked his bangs down into his eyes, soaked his clothes through, ran off his skin. It wasn't far home, anyway, and the rain smelled clean and good, washing away the pervasive odor of asphalt and exhaust. He couldn't even find it in himself to be annoyed when a fat drop of water rolled off a shop awning as he passed under and put out his cigarette. He dropped the wet thing in a public wastebin, lit up another under the brief cover of a roofledge, and by the time he made it to Roy's apartment, he was whistling between drags.

He didn't have hot cider waiting at home, but he had Roy, and that was good enough. When he opened the door and saw Roy waiting on the couch, a book in his lap and his fingertips drumming an absent pattern on the armrest, he smiled. Couldn't help but.

Roy looked up slow, and smiled back, a little absently as he always was when surfacing from reading. The smile turned into a little frown: "You're sopping." (Contrary to popular belief, Roy wasn't particularly upset by rain, but in the normal course of things he tended to ignore the weather at best; certainly he would not of his own volition let himself get so very wet.)

"Rain was nice," Jean said.

Roy didn't argue with him, but got to his feet and moved slow—as though the low sky, the rain-heavy air was thick as honey between them—to his side. "We should get you out of these wet things, Jean," he said, which was a phrase disconcertingly like something Jean's mother would have said, but with a purr around the edges, warm as cinnamon. Jean was too pleasantly relaxed to complain, though, as Roy's clever hands divested him of his soaked uniform jacket. Roy's eyebrows went up (both of them, Jean noted with pleasure; it was a very different expression than the many shades of one-eyebrow-quirked that he did so well) and his hands spread out over the black undershirt plastered to Jean's skin, fingertips scraping over his stomach and then gliding up to his chest. Jean could feel the heat of his hands clearly through wet cotton, and was suddenly aware that, nice as rain was, being soaked through had made him cold. Well, that was fixable.

"Bed," he said, and Roy's smile widened a fraction.

Still they made their way slowly, to the tune of the rain drumming steadily on the windowpanes, gushing in the gutters and dripping off the overhang of Roy's balcony. It was nice. Quiet. That was the other thing Jean liked about rain: not so much that it was an excuse to stay in as that it cocooned, made clear the difference between _in_ and _out_, made physically evident the line that separated the two. It turned the apartment somehow into a more private, personal space: theirs. Out in the public world—the office, the bar—he had to share Roy with the world (and in a lot of ways Roy was _made_ for the world, which was another way he was not like Jean), but this, here . . . .

He was glad he didn't have to find words to describe it, but still, it made him happy. Almost as happy as the press of Roy's mouth, open and inviting, wet as the air outside but _hot_. Their clothing dropped off along the way—the crisp whisper of Roy's white shirt, the much less dignified plop of his own damp tee—and Roy paused to try to ruffle the water out of Jean's hair. "God, it's like a sponge," he said, as Jean's plastered-down bangs gave up the vast quantity of water that had been necessary to make them lie down in the first place.

"I could shake like a dog, if you'd prefer," Jean retorted, quietly giddy.

"As amusing as that would be, I don't think my wallpaper would thank you."

The bedroom was always nice, because Roy paid someone to clean the apartment. The bed: wide and cool and inviting, and always made up, every day. When he'd lived in the dormitories, Jean had maintained the hard hospital-corner bed the military insisted on; once he achieved the luxury of his own apartment, he'd only ever bothered to make the bed if he was expecting female company, which was . . . well, rare. But there was something to be said once in a while for a thick comforter turned back at the top, fresh crisp sheets, taking the time to undress (the thump of boots, Jean staggering a little in an attempt to get his socks off without taking his mouth off Roy's throat) and to push back the top layer of bedding and stretch out together rather than simply falling to. Personal, like the rain-rippled windows shielding them from everything outside.

Warm hands, warm mouth, acres of warm skin. Fresh white sheets clinging to the water on his back; Roy prowling up his chest, eyes glittering, saying, "Wet is a good look for you."

"You too," Jean says, which made basically no sense; Roy wasn't wet. But what he meant was that Roy looked good, too, of course he looked good, always looked good, totally unfair as that was but right now he felt immune to the usual surge of competitiveness.

"And incoherent. I like that too."

"Hah. Jerk," Jean said, but with no heat of anger at all; it was physically impossible to be even annoyed, with the air soft and mild, the light coming through the window tinted blue and grey. Impossible to be upset in any way, with Roy settling on top of him, skin to skin, licking the damp from his collarbones and down his chest.

It took a while, slow, so long that the rainwater on his skin dried and was replaced by sweat. The room was quiet but for the sounds of breathing and of the tap of rain on the windows. Neither of them wanted to break contact to go for lube, so at the end Roy—problem-solver that he was—simply tipped them both over on their sides, face-to-face, and wrapped his hand around them, and by that time it didn't take long at all.

Afterward, Jean got up as always and opened the window for a smoke; Roy always claimed he didn't mind, but Jean didn't want to get smoke-smell in the wallpaper and the carpet. Anyway, the air was nice, cool and moist and still dripping, and he was grateful as always for the dense foliage on the holly bush outside Roy's window, shielding his bare chest from the view of passers-by. The warm coil of smoke filled his mouth, not so much relaxing him—if he relaxed any more he'd fall on his ass—as capping off his afternoon, one more small pleasure. Behind him, he could hear Roy groaning a little with the exertion of getting up, shuffling for a bathrobe (he was always less comfortable in the cold), and saying, "Xing? Or maybe that noodle shop, I liked their shrimp."

"They deliver?"

"I think so." Which from Roy could mean either 'yes, they do,' or 'no, but I can talk them into it.'

"Sure," Jean said, and exhaled, a long plume of smoke that coiled amongst the waxy holly leaves and then dissipated into the misty air.


End file.
